Occluded Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification

Visible-infrared person re-identification (VI-ReID) aims to match person images between the visible and near-infrared modalities. Previous VI-ReID methods are based on holistic pedestrian images and achieve excellent performance. However, in real-world scenarios, images captured by visible and near-infrared cameras usually contain occlusions. The performance of these methods degrades significantly due to the loss of information of discriminative features from the occlusion of the images. We define visible-infrared person re-identification in this occlusion scene as Occluded VI-ReID, where only partial content information of pedestrian images can be used to match images of different modalities from different cameras. In this paper, we propose a matching framework for occlusion scenes, which contains a local feature enhance module (LFEM) and a modality information fusion module (MIFM). LFEM adopts Transformer to learn features of each modality, and adjusts the importance of patches to enhance the representation ability of local features of the non-occluded areas. MIFM utilizes a co-attention mechanism to infer the correlation between each image for reducing the difference between modalities. We construct two occluded VI-ReID datasets, namely Occluded-SYSU-MM01 and Occluded-RegDB datasets. Our approach outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on two occlusion datasets, while remains top performance on two holistic datasets.